January 28, 2015

Social Media Metrics: Useful Or Available?

Now that nobody with a functioning brain pays any
attention to social media "metrics" (like followers and likes) you have
to wonder how advertising and marketing wizards spent years being mesmerized by this
bullshit.

I think the answer is simple.
It's so difficult to isolate the effect of advertising on sales results that people grasp at anything that sounds like a measurement and is simple to understand.

I
don't think social media metrics were fashionable because they were indicative of anything useful or meaningful, they were fashionable because they were easy to come by and easy to comprehend.When The Noise Is Stronger Than The Signal
It is not unusual for click through rates for banner ads to hover in the .02 to .03% range. That's 2 or 3 clicks per 10,000 impressions. (I use the term "impressions" with great trepidation.)

This is so astoundingly low that I wonder if it is a real number. It seems to me that the margin of error may be far greater than the result itself.

For example, if the margin of error in counting clicks is 1%, that would be 100 clicks in 10,000. In that environment, are 2 or 3 clicks real or just noise?

Are there any statisticians out there who can advise us? Prof. Sharp?Our Doctors Are Rockstars
In my hometown of Oakland California, there is a children's hospital called, not surprisingly, Children's Hospital Oakland.

For several months now there has been a huge banner hanging from the top of the hospital that says, Our Doctors Are Rockstars. This bugs the shit out of me.

Apparently the dimwits who conceived this banner believe higher virtue obtains to the nincompoops who sing pop songs than to people who save the lives of children.

What a joy it would be to wake up one day and see a sign somewhere that said, Our Rockstars Are Doctors.Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?
Is the title of a wonderful, gorgeous book by Alfredo Marcantonio,
David Abbott, and John O'Driscoll. Like I said in my Amazon review, if you're thinking of a career in advertising it will show you how it's
supposed to be done. If you're working in advertising it will remind you
of why.

Margin of error usually means that the data is sampled. E.g. when a survey interviews 1000 people and then scales those answers up to represent the whole population. You get an estimate that's not 100% accurate, because you only talked to 1000 people, not to everybody. The more people you talk to, the smaller the error gets.

This doesn't usually apply in digital, where you're counting ALL of the impressions (ahem) and all of the clicks. The data isn't sampled.

Half of the clicks might well be accidental though. They're 'real' clicks, but it's potentially a big error.http://adage.com/article/digital/incredible-click-rate/236233/

You're right about the seductive power a simple number has on the minds of management. Even when it's proven to be irrelevant to the actual task at hand.

The economist Robert Chambers put it like this ..."Economists have come to feelWhat can't be measured isn't real.The truth is always an amount -Count numbers; only numbers count."

(Jeremy Bullmore cited this in his wonderfully entertaining lecture "Posh Spice and Persil", which is available on the WPP website and should be compulsory reading for everyone with an interest in brands).

"WARNING: This book will make you laugh out loud."

"The Most provocative Man In Advertising"

"Savage Critiques Of Digital Hype"

"Fabulously Irreverent"

Over 60,000 people have watched Bob's talk at Advertising week, Europe

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"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

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